Commonplacing the public domain

27 Pages·2016·0.43 MB·English

Commonplacing the public domain: reading the classics
socially on the Kindle
Abstract
Amazon leads the market in ebooks with the Kindle brand, which encompasses a range
of dedicated e-reader devices and a large ebook store. Kindle users are able to share the
experience of reading ebooks purchased from Amazon by selecting passages of text for
upload to the Kindle Popular Highlights website. In this article, I propose that the
Kindle Popular Highlights database contains evidence that readers are re-appropriating
commonplacing – the act of selecting important passages from a text and recording
them in a separate location for later re-use – while reading public domain titles on the
Kindle. An analysis of keyness in a corpus of 34,044 shared highlights from public
domain titles suggests that readers focus on words relating to philosophy and values to
draw an understanding of contemporary society from these classic works. This form of
highlighting takes precedent over understanding and sharing key narrative moments.
An examination of the top ten most popular authors in the corpus, and case studies of
Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, demonstrates
variation in highlighting practice as readers are choosing to shorten famous
commonplaces in order to change their context for an audience that extends beyond the
original reader. Through this analysis, I propose that Kindle users’ highlighting
patterns are shaped by the behaviour of other readers and reflect a shared
understanding of an audience beyond the initial highlighter.
Keywords
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Amazon.com, Commonplace book, Digital reading, Ebooks, Highlighting, History of
reading, Kindle, Kindle Public Highlights, Public domain books, Social reading
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1 Introduction
The rise of digital media has led to the re-examination of historical literacy practices
including the act of commonplacing.1 The tradition of commonplacing refers to the
historical practice of selecting important parts of a text to remember and reflect upon
for their significance beyond their original textual context (see Blair, 1992, Lesser and
Stallybrass, 2008; Throsby, 2012). In this article, I use keyword analysis of the Kindle
Popular Highlights website (Amazon Inc., 2014) together with close analysis of
variations between similar highlights to investigate how readers of public domain
ebooks use shared reading functions to carry out a contemporary form of
commonplacing. This analysis suggests that Kindle users’ shared highlights that focus
on shared wisdom or pivotal narrative moments are guided by the affordances of the
platform and an awareness of an audience much larger than the individual reader.
2 Background: Kindle Popular Highlights and social reading
2.1 Reading together online
Digital social reading has been framed as a break from traditional forms of reading,
and previous research has analysed several important sites for interaction such as the
GoodReads website (Nakamura, 2013). One of the key sites for such interaction is the
website maintained by leading online retailer, Amazon (see Allington, 2016: Section 1
for further discussion). The Amazon website enables readers to post reviews of books,
and these have been the subject of a number of academic studies focusing on contrasts
between ‘popular’ and ‘highbrow’ forms of literary culture (Gutjahr, 2002; Steiner
2008; Allington, 2016). As well as selling physical books, Amazon is the world’s
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leading ebook retailer, thanks to its Kindle range of tablet computers and dedicated e-
readers, which are designed in order to direct sales traffic towards Amazon’s online
store. Like the Amazon website, the Kindle provides a social infrastructure facilitating
interactions between Amazon customers. Cameron (2012: 86) posits a link between the
Kindle’s shared highlight feature, which offers the reader the chance to share a section
of an ebook with other readers of the same title, and the aide-memoire of marginalia in
print culture. Barnett (2014) argues that shared highlights extend beyond an aide
memoire for a single reader, as Kindle Popular Highlights ‘suggest[s] the promise of
facilitating deeper reading conducted across social networks, of motivation for reading
for reluctant readers, for productive readings in educational settings, and for guided
readings through the involvement of teachers of literature and authors themselves’.
While this seems optimistic, Cameron’s (2012: 89) study of highlighting in a single
electronic edition of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes suggests that a pre-existing
pattern of frequently highlighted passages can drive future behaviour as the ‘hive
mind’ converges on already popular quotations focusing on ‘love, method, and
culture’. While ‘method’ is a core theme in Sherlock Holmes which might not extend
to other titles, ‘love’ and ‘culture’ may feature as commonplaces in the Kindle Popular
Highlights. In this article, I will use the corpus linguistic approach of indentifying
keyness and collocates in order to test whether Cameron’s findings extend beyond
Sherlock Holmes.
2.2 Accessing Kindle Popular Highlights
In order to analyse large-scale datasets, researchers require access to data that is often
proprietary, and Kindle Popular Highlights represented an uncharacteristic degree of
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openness from Amazon. Users were able to view what their fellow readers had
highlighted on titles they had not purchased, which provided a useful marketing tool
for popular titles on the Kindle. Amazon made this data available as a public resource
from early 2011 to mid-2014, when it obfuscated access to the database through
removing a central list of the most highlighted passages, requiring users to instead
crawl through four million individual records to collate the same data.2 While the
dataset was in circulation, it provided a cache of data that offered an insight into how
various parts of the Kindle’s infrastructure were used. For example, while Amazon
boasts a catalogue of several million ebooks, it is unclear which titles users are
purchasing, let alone reading. Kindle Popular Highlights cannot map the reading habits
of all users, but it reveals which ebooks a subset of Amazon customers have purchased
and subsections that a proportion of those readers found interesting.
The dataset cannot be used to form hypotheses about small-scale reading practices as it
only offers a macroscopic view of highlighting culture, such as the number of people
who have highlighted a particular passage. There is no ability to break down the
demographics of this mass readership or see how any one reader has highlighted his or
her copy of the book. However, the dataset still provides a large body of evidence with
regard to textual fragments that Kindle users wished to record and share. In response to
these methodological limitations, I have been careful to focus primarily on the textual
evidence without trying to reconstruct the intention of readers.
I will use two approaches to the Popular Highlights culture: first, a comparison of the
keywords in public domain highlights against both the Kindle Popular Highlights
dataset and a selection of Project Gutenberg texts to represent texts in the public
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domain; and second, a close analysis of highlighting patterns in the works of the ten
most popular authors and repetition across unique editions of the same titles to reveal
the interests of readers. The combination of large and micro-scale analysis is
instrumental in understanding new cultures of literacy. Analysis of screen reading
offers methodological frameworks for understanding literacy, but these must be
considered through an understanding of its historical precedents.
2.3 The historical context of commonplacing
Historical context can offer illuminating parallels between print and digital culture.
The Kindle Popular Highlights infrastructure facilitates a behaviour analogous to the
historical act of commonplacing, which Blair (1992: 541) describes as ‘select[ing]
passages of interest for the rhetorical turns of phrase, the dialectical arguments, or the
factual information they contain’. These commonplaces were either noted in the
margins of the book being read, or formalised into manuscript books to collate a single
reader’s activity.
Valenza (2009: 220) demonstrates how commonplacing helped transform narratives
into wisdom, since the act of copying important passages from the text to the margins
or separate notebook allows readers to focus on parts of the text that impart particular
truths or values instead of teasing out the narrative as a whole. This practice was
formalised with the rise of the anthology, which functioned as an extended form of
commonplacing pre-approved by the publisher and ‘trained readers to pace themselves
through an unmanageable bulk of print by knowing when to skip and where to linger’
(Price, 2000: 4). The commonplace book encourages readers to view texts as
collections of aphorisms that can be manipulated in various ways through focusing on
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decontextualized expressions of wisdom rather than on narrative (McGill, 2007: 357).
In this framework, the commonplace book can be seen as the database to complement
the narrative of the original text (Manovich 2001: 231). The collation of
commonplaces into a single cross-referenced repository in book form provides a clear
precursor to the popular highlights database.
Authors such as John Milton and Francis Bacon maintained commonplace books that
served as a record of their composition process. These manuscripts were later
preserved through publication to allow readers to track the development of these
famous authors’ works. While this emphasises the individuality of each reader, Kindle
Popular Highlights transforms the highlighting behaviour of vast numbers of readers
into an amorphous whole, where it is difficult to distinguish the individual from the
group, creating a new type of commonplace that focuses on convergence rather than
individuality.
2.4 Shared highlights on the Kindle

Figure 1. An example of a popular highlight from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (2007). The shared highlight
is lightly underlined and, when clicked, reveals a speech bubble stating the number of times the highlight has been
shared
The Kindle’s highlighting infrastructure is complex. Highlights can be used to
bookmark an important part of the text or can be viewed within a personalised
commonplace book that contains the accumulative highlights of the user’s reading.
Readers can also choose to publicly share their highlights, which are then amalgamated
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into the complete shared highlights dataset. The most popular passages have been
shared over ten thousand times, but the majority have received fewer than a dozen
highlights. Any highlight will be stored in Amazon’s database, but will not be visible
for readers of the ebook or database unless it is one of the top ten most popular
highlights within the title. Each publicly shared quotation is the tip of an iceberg, as the
bulk of shared highlights may be spread thinly throughout the ebook, particularly in the
most popular titles where the threshold for inclusion is several thousand.
Unfortunately, this means it is impossible to know the full extent of highlighting
culture on the Kindle, which means that researchers must rather focus on homogenous
reading practices that are publicly visible. The feature has enjoyed great popularity, as
users have generated a million unique highlights from over one hundred thousand
titles. Shared highlights then appear in two locations: (1) in the ebook, although users
must purchase the title to see this; and (2) a publicly maintained database, which will
be the focus of this paper.
The technical configuration of the Kindle’s shared highlight function encourages
comparison with commonplace books. The link between commonplaces and Kindle
Popular Highlights is part of a wider trend of skeuomorphism, or borrowing cues from
other media cultures, within the Kindle infrastructure. The highlighting function uses
skeuomorphisms through reference to ‘My Notebook’ as the location where users can
read their highlights for each individual book, and their collation into the ‘My
Clippings’ file, itself a riff on scrapbook aesthetics and a narrative of disassembly and
reassembly. The Kindle Popular Highlights infrastructure requires a combination of
local and remote storage to cater for audiences inside and beyond the individual titles.
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The only way to add new quotations to the system is through those ebooks. Once
shared, highlights are rendered distinct from the books, and as the database does not
maintain a constant shape, they can be viewed in multiple contexts. In this way, the
highlight has morphed from a stable entity in a single manifestation of a book to a fluid
and promiscuous data point, which is disassembled and reassembled at will. It is
important to note that Kindle Popular Highlights is opt-in – not all users will
necessarily choose to either see or interact with these highlights – and this represents a
further departure from the traditional approach to highlight culture as the potential
audience becomes much larger. Jackson (2002: 96–97) proposes that the creation of
marginalia is a ‘four-way transaction’ involving ‘text, reader, target audience,
unknown future reader’. Kindle users who choose to share their highlights extend the
‘target audience’ and ‘unknown future reader’ into a large potential audience which
may discover the shared highlight through reading the book or exploring the separate
popular highlights website.
2.5 The importance of public domain ebooks
The Kindle Popular Highlights database contains a hetereogenous selection of texts,
since readers are naturally interested in a broad variety of texts. In order to mitigate
this disorder, I focus on a subset of ebooks that have had a particular role in the
development of ebook culture: public domain texts. The economics of public domain
ebooks, which are often sold cheaply or released free of charge, have ensured a robust
market, although users may not have necessarily read them. Focusing on these texts
creates a more homogenous and manageable dataset, but it also provides several
secondary benefits. Public domain books have a pre-formed reception due to their
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survival and circulation as digital editions. While the deluge of new ebooks being
published can be difficult to sift through, public domain ebooks have undergone a form
of consecration, which has an ancillary effect on contemporary readers’ interactions
with them, as users may find their reading shaped by the wealth of material based upon
the book’s reception prior to their interaction with the text. This can lead to a
convergence of thought and reaction to texts that are familiar, which is the perfect
counterpart to the hive mind culture of Kindle Popular Highlights.
Unfortunately, it is not easy to identify the limits of the public domain. The precise
limits of the public domain are ambiguous, because recent copyright legislation has left
the status of many texts unclear (see Spoo, 2013: Epilogue). Consequently, prospective
publishers have an uneasy notion of what counts as public domain, particularly as the
ebook marketplace has become global and therefore has to abide by the most stringent
copyright legislation across the world. Since this project is not concerned with solving
the complex issues of copyright, works that are treated as if they are public domain are
included due to their consecration and integration into this aspect of ebook culture.
Due to the fuzziness of the public domain in Kindle Popular Highlights and the poor
quality of Amazon’s metadata for public domain ebooks, the project works with a
sample of 34,044 highlights – a corpus of over one million words – from public
domain authors rather than the complete database.
Through this context of the Kindle’s popular highlights culture, I will assess how users
are appropriating this feature as an aspect of both individual and social literacy.
Analysis of the public domain works in Kindle Popular Highlights reveals a correlation
between shared highlights culture and commonplacing practices. Linguistic analysis of
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